It’s the 1970s, and a little girl is looking out at her backyard in Queens, New York, but what she sees is far from ordinary. About to be buried underneath the soil, you see, is a dismembered human corpse. Clods of dirt swirl in the air before the body suddenly disappears from view.
This horrific image stays with the child so much so that 40 years later she’ll still remember the remains’ exact location, and she’ll finally decide to confess the truth. Hello, wonderful people, I’m Scott Leffler for Wonderbot, and here is a woman who told police that she’d seen a body being buried in her backyard 40 years ago.
Before we begin, make sure to smash that like button, subscribe to our channel, and click the notification bell for more amazing videos. It’s fair to say that New York has seen its fair share of bodies being buried. With more residents packed into its five boroughs than in any other U.S. city, it’s hardly surprising that violence sometimes spills out onto its streets. In the 1980s, misdemeanors reached an all-time high, a phenomenon doubtlessly spurred on in part by the city’s cocaine craze. Since 1991, though, the situation seems to have improved, and in 2017, murder rates were the lowest they’d been for approximately seven decades. The Economist categorized New York among the globe’s top 10 safest large metropolises in 2015. However, the city that never sleeps is by no means free of heinous crime. In fact, New York has been home to many atrocities, some of which have never been solved. With about 9,000 open homicides dating back to 1985 on the books, cops are still reaching for answers to thousands of horrifying cases. But imagine then how difficult it must be to solve a decades-old murder case where the body’s only just been uncovered. Harvesting evidence from decomposed remains is much trickier than dealing with a recent corpse, after all, and any potential witnesses may well have forgotten crucial details too, or indeed died themselves. So, trying to identify the culprit of such a crime must be a mammoth task.
The New York police have dealt with several of them. Take, for instance, the mysterious story of Joanne Nichols, a 55-year-old woman who seemingly led an ordinary life. She lived in the city of Poughkeepsie with her husband, James, and she worked as an elementary teacher. Yet, in the mid-80s, Joanne vanished without a trace. Then, decades later, her body was discovered in the basement of her old house. Shockingly, Joanne’s remains had lain there undetected for close to 30 years. The cops first learned of the case four days before Christmas in 1985 when James Nichols dialed 9-1-1 to report Joanne’s disappearance. According to James, you see, his wife had never arrived for a scheduled appointment at the salon that day. Within 24 hours, it seemed as though the police had come across a lead: the Nichols car was found abandoned at one of Poughkeepsie’s shopping malls, but Joanne was nowhere to be seen. After the discovery of the car, a thorough police investigation was mounted, but their efforts were in vain. In 2013, Thomas Morrow, the town’s chief of police at the time of the disappearance, told CNN that Joanne still hadn’t been found, although officers have been revisiting the case every year in a bid to shed new light on what had happened. But the cops’ big break came that same year when an unsuspecting contractor uncovered something horrifying in the Nichols’ basement. Yes, a builder stumbled across Joanne’s remains in the lower levels of the couple’s Poughkeepsie abode. According to the medical examiner of Dutchess County, New York, Dr. Kerry Rieber, the skeleton’s hands were found bound together with a cord, and the entire body was swathed in a layer of sheeting. The corpse had been shoved into a plastic sack and then stuffed into a container before being hidden behind a fake wall in the cellar. As the body had lain in its hiding place for so long, though, it was difficult at first to tell whom it belonged to. You see, decomposition had stripped the cadaver down to the bone by the time that it was discovered. With so little evidence to go on, then, the medical examiner’s team had to resort to dental records, and using these, they subsequently identified the skeleton as Joanne’s. As well as identifying the body, though, the coroners were also able to determine how Joanne died, and it hadn’t been by accident. Yes, according to Rieber, a large area of the right side of the skull was missing, and it’s this injury that’s likely to have caused her death. The coroner’s reported that Joanne succumbed to a hit on the head that seemingly caved in part of her skull. But who had dealt the fatal blow? Well, the cops apparently think that James may have been involved. They were unable to question Joanne’s husband, however, as he’d passed away before his wife’s remains were found. Indeed, officers had discovered the widower’s body on December 27, 2012, when they’d visited his home to follow up on neighbors’ worries about his well-being. Unlike his wife’s passing, though, there was no evidence of foul play. Police declared that the 82-year-old had died naturally. Yet despite the fact that police’s main lead was now six feet under, they still hope to find answers. In 2013, Poughkeepsie authorities announced that the case was far from closed. In fact, they were planning on reviewing additional forensic evidence that investigators had uncovered at the crime scene. James was still on their radar too. “It’s now safe to say James Nichols as a suspect in this case,” Police Captain Paul Lecompte said, according to CNN.
Mysterious crimes of this kind have occurred in other parts of New York too. For instance, in Jericho, a hamlet that lies almost 30 miles east of central Manhattan, a body was found under similarly strange circumstances in the fall of 1999. Rather than being concealed behind a false wall, however, these desiccated remains were hidden in a house’s crawl space, and they’d been there for decades. The body was eventually identified as belonging to a female called Reyna Angelica Marroquin, born in 1941 in El Salvador. She later left her Central American homeland and moved to the United States, and the young woman soon found herself in gainful employment too, earning or living as a nanny. It was Merrick Queen’s job as a factory worker, however, that would allegedly prove fatal for the 28-year-old in 1969. You see, Marroquin worked on Manhattan’s East 34th Street producing artificial flowers for a business called Melrose Plastics, and it was there that Howard Elkins, one of the company’s owners, seemingly took quite a liking to a Salvadoran employee. In fact, one of Marroquin’s confidantes, a woman called Kathy Androd, reported to police officers that her friend and Elkins had been romantically involved. Knowledge of the pair’s affair seemed to be common knowledge among some of the employees of Melrose Plastics too.
